> I've been thinking about this for some time yet, and there is no need to
> separate the drivers.
I disagree. We currently have code in wdc.c that does things to ATA devices
that vary from merely not recommended to strictly forbidden. I want NetBSD to
have the best quality ATA/ATAPI driver that it can, and I believe that we need
to shed much of the old WDC code to do this.
> ..., or
> brokeness of the ATA specs (like the 30s delay after a reset).
This raises another point. We don't wait for 30s after a reset, and we
shouldn't be doing resets (according to the bit if the spec that I recall). I
don't mind waiting 30s for a disk to spin up, it's certainly better than some
systems that have had to publish workarounds because they try and boot from
disks that haven't spun up yet.
> Ripping out this code would probably break some ATA hardware.
I do not want to remove any code that is needed to support any device that
identifies itself as either ATA or ATAPI. I expect that some older ATA devices
don't identify themselves as ATA, but they can still be driven by the old WDC
code.
> I've been thinking about delaying the probe of ATA devices after inetrupts
> enable (like SCSI) exept for non-direct busses (should be only ISA).
That shouldn't be necessary, but if it makes something else easier, I certainly won't argue against it.
Cheers,
Lloyd